Golden Catridge
by Akktri
Summary: In this alternative spin on the Captain N story, Kevin discovers Videoland in a magical game cartridge.
1. Chapter 1: Prologue

My weird adventures in the parallel world of Videoland began one fateful summer I went to the Hart Drive-In.

In the late eighties, they didn't have eBay or Amazon. The best you could do was plug in a computer, dial a phone number for an electronic billboard service and hope it had what you wanted. This was why the Hart Drive-In Swap N' Shop off Eastwood Trafficway was such a magical place.

The drive in movie industry had fizzled somewhat in recent years. There was a_ Facts of Life_ episode about their general decline. People preferred actual movie theaters, or, even better, video cassettes at home, so places like the Hart Drive-In fell into disrepair, and would have been completely bulldozed off the map, if not for informal sales gatherings like this one.

Now, instead of cars and trucks parking between the broken gray speaker poles, there lay random assortments of new and used goods spread out on blankets or tables, or the back of the occasional pickup. The big screen still towered over the lot, but the sun and weather had reduced it to a cracked, faded, off gray square.

If you didn't know what you were looking for, it seemed like a lot of junk, old farm equipment, cheap Mexican toys, dishes, baby clothes, like a huge garage sale...but sometimes you could find _electronics. _It was the promise of _video games_, peripherals, especially Nintendo products, that kept me coming there every Sunday. I'd don my letter jacket, hop on my bike, and pedal down five blocks with Duke, my Jack Russel Terrier running along beside me in his blue neckerchief. I chained my bike to a tree (people have tried to sell it out from under me before), wander the rows of vendors.

I own more than a hundred Nintendo cartridges and dozens of Atari games, maybe more if you counted the games I borrowed from the library and kept overdue. If you go through the normal channels, the department stores and shopping malls, a collection like that could easily put you and your parents in the poor house. But at the Hart, you can get some pretty good deals. One of my favorite dealers was a little Peruvian guy that went by the nickname Squeegee.

His real name was Jorge but people generally called him by the other name. I swear, if super Mario came from south of the border, he would be Squeegee. Overalls, plump body, mustache, ball cap...the Brazilian soccer shirt was the only weird part of his ensemble. Some of my best treasures came from Squeegee's sale space, _Zelda_, _Maniac Mansion_, _Magic of Scheherazade_...he told me his wife left him and took the kids along, leaving behind all that stuff. Not sure if I believe his kids agreed to have all their stuff sold off at discount price, but why look a gift horse in the mouth?

Upon seeing me that fateful day, Squeegee got up from his rug, flashing a handful of cartridges in my face. "These look amazing. Amigo, you hear about _Mother?_ It's Japanese. I just got it in. _You like those dungeon games, right?_"

I shrugged. "Does it work in a U.S. machine?"

He grinned, probably thinking he already had a half a sale.

"Amigo, it's called _Famicom_, but it's not any different."

"_Have you actually tested it?_"

The look on his face said he hadn't. "Well, I _put it in the machine. _It fits, señor."

I chuckled. "That's okay. I don't speak Japanese anyway. What else you got?"

He showed me a couple more things, _Thunder and Lightning, Kiwi Craze_, an obscure title called _Pilgrim_ by Mutiny Software. The last one turned out to be a little weird. Squeegee said you had to press reset to start it up, like those cheesy Bible video games, but apparently it was an excellent game. I bought all three.

"I got something else for you, amigo..." He showed me a wooden box, covered in carvings of birds and cornstalk people. "This one..._I don't know. _I show you because you're a serious collector. Let me know what you think."

A chill ran down my back as I examined the thing. I felt an almost electric tingle traveling through my hands as I held it. The box contained a metal Nintendo cartridge, gold and shaped like a game genie, but with little red crystals and embossed arabesques. No manufacturers labels, just a title emblazoned across the front reading `Videoland' in the fancy script they used for the covers of Dune novels.

"I tried getting it appraised, but they say it's not worth that much. Some fancy aluminum and plastic, a couple pieces of quartz. Not sure what it does either. I put it in the tray and the games look just the same as before. _It's nice though. _Got it from an old Indian guy. He says it's magic, but I say he _loco. _I only buy because I like how it looks. Now that I know it's cheap, I'm liking it less."

"How much you want for it?"

He wanted fifty, but I argued that was too much for a non functioning accessory, so I talked him down to thirty five.

"You let me know right away if it does anything," Squeegee joked. _"Maybe you owe me money."_

I smirked. _"Right. I'll do that."_

Thanking him, I handed over the money, leaving him to stroll the rest of the flea market.

I didn't see much else I really wanted. People were selling motorcycle and Mercedes engine parts, lots of clothes, I found a collection of view master slides, Gremlins memorabilia, and a whole bunch of McDonald's toys, but nothing that really grabbed my attention. I went home.

I lived in a nice suburban ranch house, in a bedroom directly above the garage. To be honest, my room looked a little nuts...I had issues of Nintendo power piled up everywhere, NES and Atari cartridges stacked up in towers around my TV, and huge full color maps and posters for various games covering my walls. Some guys liked to put the centerfold up there...well, I _did_ have _Princess Zelda_ and _Samus_.

My furniture was solid oak, family heirlooms, mostly. I had the power glove, rapid fire joysticks, controllers with built-in sticks plus rapid fire and slow mo...you can thank Squeegee for that.

The floor kinda belonged to Duke. His toys were all over near his bed, though I did have my baseball bat and glove and other sports stuff lying about.

Squeegee was right. The device really didn't seem to do that much. I plugged it in, played Duck Hunt for a few minutes, but I couldn't tell a difference, other than the fact I was way out of practice, and the ducks seemed a lot smarter than I remembered. They kept getting away. I had school the next morning, so I gave it up and went to bed.

I didn't actually sleep that much. After a few hours restless tossing and turning, I got up during the night and played some other games, _Legend of Zelda_, _Metroid_, _Tiger Heli_, _Startropics, Mario_...all the games seemed..._more difficult than before_, as if they knew my every move before I made them, but I couldn't prove the metal device had anything to do with it. After all, in Startropics, you only have four squares to jump on while fighting Octo the Huge (the octopus boss), so the chances are one in four that the monster will randomly strike you and end your game. That's not magic, it's probability with crappy odds.

I ended my late night marathon with another failed attempt at Duck Hunt. Chalking it up to fatigue, I took in a little shut eye.

My alarm awakened me four hours later. Groaning, I switched it off and got up.

The moment I gained a vertical position, I felt something like a dish breaking under my feet.

I looked down, frowning at the broken shards.

It was gray, its concentric rings resembling a Frisbee, the word Remington embossed across it. My brain, having not fully awakened yet, decided that Duke had brought the thing into the house somehow.

I didn't give the thing a second thought, just shuffled to my dresser, digging out my clothes for the day.

Feeling feathers under my bare feet, I glanced down, scowled, decided that Duke had ripped open a pillow, went to take a shower.

More feathers outside. Mom kept the hallway immaculately tidy. I could already imagine the complaints she'd be making when she started picking up. "Duke..._what did you do?"_

As I stumbled further down the hall, I noticed Duke growling at the bathroom door. I yawned, grabbed the knob.

The moment the door opened, a cloud of feathers exploded in my face, flapping wings beating against me, angrily quacking beaks pecking me in the head.

I stumbled into the staircase railing, fell over the side.


	2. Chapter 2: Quacking Up

Luckily, I didn't break any bones when I fell downstairs, just incurred some serious bruises.

"Kevin!" My mother shouted. "What are you doing up there!"

Honestly, I wasn't sure. I couldn't even believe my own eyes.

It was the largest squadron of ducks I'd ever seen. They poured out the bathroom like Bozos from a clown car. Normal looking, garden variety mallards. The weirdest thing about them, other than their choice of nesting location, were the way they sounded. The noises their feathers made when they flapped their wings, the tinny quacking sounds coming out of their beaks.

"Mom!" I yelled. "We got..._birds in the house!_" An understatement, but hey, we've had our fair share of crows and pigeons bumbling their way into the house. I figured it best not to stretch it beyond a normal sane person's credibility.

My mother, hair in curlers, came up and stared open mouthed at the ducks, who, bizarrely enough, had the habit of flying in a Z pattern and quacking at every bend. Her narrow face had the sour expression she might have reserved for a drunken hobo urinating on her flower bed. Indignant, but not crazy enough to try to stop them. "I'm... Not sure we can just get rid of all that with a simple blanket...I'm. ..going to call animal control."

As she marched down from the landing, though, an unnaturally colored red duck made a beeline for her head.

With a shriek, mom picked up a broom and gave it a mighty swing.

The broom made contact with the bird's skull, which, adding to the surreal unreality of the situation, caused the creature to fly across the room like a shuttlecock, hit a wall, and spiral to the floor.

When you drop a bag of sugar, there's an expected solid noise associated with the action. You would have thought that this bird would have likewise made some sort of meaty thump sound upon striking the hardwood, but instead I heard a hollow imitation of an object hitting ground, like an electronic version of the stock 'crump' Charlie Brown makes when he misses the football and drops in the dirt.

Mom furrowed her brow, rubbing her forehead like she had a headache. "I must be dreaming all this...I'm going back to bed." Upon her departure from the stairs, I heard her muttering something about "Red and blue ducks with kung fu sound effects." Sure enough, I _did_ spot some birds of both colors.

Neon red and blue ducks, I thought. Some kind of refugees from a genetic research facility?

Mom took her broom with her, but I had a baseball bat in my bedroom. I rushed up the stairs to retrieve it, swatting away dozens of beaked pests as I made my way to the door.

Reality at this point went even more sideways.

When I entered my room, I found Duke growling at another dog, _whose head was coming out of the TV screen._

The front half of the canine looked real, down to the whiskers and bad breath. Its rear, though, resembled a cartoon, standing in front of a similarly unrealistic backdrop.

By now, I had come to a few startling realizations. First of all, I wasn't dreaming because _the fall down the stairs actually hurt_. Secondly, although I had suspicions earlier, it was now obvious that animals from my duck hunt game had somehow come to life and escaped my TV.

Although it felt rather silly, I did the first thing that popped into my head, grabbing the plastic light gun attached to the console and pressing it against the electronic hound's forehead. _"Get back! I'm not afraid to use this!"_

It was a bloodhound. It didn't comprehend English or the meaning of the white-orange toy pointed at its skull.

I pulled the trigger.

Please understand that I love animals (the real ones, anyway) and would never intentionally harm one. I was only holding what I thought to be a plastic video game peripheral designed to shoot harmless light particles at a TV screen. Also, I tried to fire at the mocking, previously cartoony mutt lots of times during gameplay, and it hadn't done a damn thing.

What happened next, though, wasn't harmless at all. A flash of light, brighter than I thought possible from that little toy, came out the muzzle of the device.

The bloodhound's eyes got real big. It exploded.

I expected the explosion to be rather messy. After all, the duck mom swatted with her broom still lay unmoving downstairs on the wood floor. However, instead of leaving a bloody half carcass in front of the television, the bloodhound sort of _shattered into a million tiny cubes_ that vanished seconds after hitting the ground, like sparks from a Roman candle.

Not exactly heartbroken about the whole exchange. The snotty canine giggled at me every time I missed a duck, or lost a game.

Speaking of which, a moment later, a whole flock of those weirdly flying mallards came bursting through my doorway.

Okay, so not exactly unfamiliar for me to stand next to my set and shoot a light gun at ducks. If anything, doing it in 3D made the interface less counterintuitive.

The ducks made a mess of my room, broke a lamp, smashed a picture frame, and left droppings and feathers everywhere, but I downed five if them.

Duke, excited at the prospect of eating fresh game, rushed to a dead bird and sank his teeth into it. My dog uttered a noise that sounded a lot like a human "Huuhh?" The verdict seemed to be that the ducks were inedible, but he still liked to chew on them like a rawhide bone.

Unfortunately, their avian friends weren't happy about the turn of events. Dozens more of the unnatural waterfowl flew into my face.

For a brief second, I could see nothing but feathery wings and angrily pecking beaks. The light gun flew from my hands as I desperately fought to keep them at bay.

I dove for my weapon, fired blindly in every direction. Four more birds dropped to the carpet, the others scattering away from me, to regroup.

It was only then that I noticed my gun had become unplugged from the console. Like a character in the _Tommyknockers_, I had operated an appliance without the power being connected.

Although that kinda scared me, I still found the idea of having a sort of superpower exciting, so I went cowboy on the whole flock.

It turns out that, despite how the weapon worked unplugged, it had limited ammunition. After knocking down six more of the feathery nuisances, the weapon ceased to work.

It seemed only logical to plug it back in, see if it could recharge, or at least work while attached to the box.

According to the rules of the game, your bullet supply only replenishes by clearing a round or losing and starting over from the beginning. The readout at the bottom of the screen said my gun had used its last bullet, but eight targets still remained.

For all intents and purposes, the game should have been over, but instead I only saw the same motionless cartoon forest background and player statistics.

If you've played video games for any time at all, you inevitably come to a point where you wish you could just reach into the screen and take matters into your own hands.

I grabbed my aluminum baseball bat and made use of all that practice I'd been doing on weekends. Sure, I may have punched a hole in the wall, broken a window and cracked a mirror, but I was definitely on point.

I swatted every last one I could find, turning my bedroom carpet into a large feathery mound of assorted beaks, legs and wings.

A message flashed across the television screen: ROUND THREE.

My eyes widened in horror as I saw the first digital duck appear in the electronic forest.

I rushed to the set, stabbed the power button on the Nintendo, only to find out it had never been pushed in. The little red light had been on all this time, but the button, until that moment, remained in the off position I'd left it in last night.

I pulled the power supply out of the wall, but the duck continued flying in its weird zigzag pattern on the brightly colored background.

It turned to face me, quacking as it flapped its wings, again moving in a zigzag.

I grabbed the cartridge, yanked it out of the Nintendo.

The bird's head emerged from the television. It quacked.

A second later, the screen went dark, and a severed bird head plopped bloodlessly onto the carpeting.

Trembling, I staggered to my bed, staring in disbelief at the horrible mess...Then the gold cartridge.

Could a person experience pain in a dream? If the answer was no, how was all of this possible? How did that thing work without power? Did anything like this happen to Squeegee?

And how was I going to explain all this damage to mom?

The clay pigeons...Those must have come out of the game too. Could I somehow extract gold coins from Super Mario Bros without goombas coming out of the screen and trying to kill me?

Also, do dead digital birds rot? If so, what will the neighbors or the trash collectors think of me disposing of so many of them?

Was Duke wrong? Could they be defeathered and baked in an oven? And would there be enough room in the freezer to store the ones we didn't eat?

My weary puzzling got interrupted by what felt like a massive earthquake. Glass fell from the window, my mirror cracked further, pictures tumbled from the wall, books, magazines and cartridges nose dived into the bird mounds.

I rushed to the window _frame_, eyes bugging out at what I saw rolling across my neighbor's yard.

A _tank _of a weirdly simple design, one that didn't match the shape of anything in the history of tanks.

The machine was gray, devoid of military insignias or markings. Its turret was a plain polygonal box with a huge cigarette-like cannon attachment, a bubble on its roof suggesting how a driver might climb inside the vehicle, but in actuality just a small seamless bump that provided no means of ingress. Its treads, though scalloped on the edges to imply traction, resembled giant rubber bands, and on each of the tank's four sides there stood a sort of big useless looking metal brick, built into the armor plating.

To my dismay, I saw the tank's turret whirl around to face Mr. Pritzel's upstairs bedroom.

The muzzle flashed, an immense projectile, shaped more or less exactly like a quarter smashing through the man's dormer windows.


End file.
